The work examines educational beliefs of teachers and decision makers in universities. Based on problem-based interviews typologies shall be developed and questions concerning the connections between Beliefs and innovative teaching (e.g. eLearning) be answered.

Strict copyright and privacy laws are considered a hindrance in the use of Web 2.0-technologies by scholars in teaching and research. The German copyright act tries to ameliorate the issues by granting a special right to make small parts of a work or even small works available to a specific group (!). However, legal uncertainty and a restrictive environment prevent many scholars from using the web and limit them to more traditional means of communication. To better understand the actual influence of law on scholar's online activity, statistical evidence of actual use is necessary and means to properly analyse that data must be determined. In addition, to gain a proper understanding of the current situation of German scholars, one must look beyond the German borders. While an examination of other European Union countries and the United States based on both publications and personal contacts is feasible, there is currently no information on the situation in Australia. To properly research those facts, personal interviews conducted abroad are inevitable.

The research project is concerned with the semantic content of the term publication in the context of academic online publications (e.g. e-journals, researchers’ homepages, web 2.0 publication services such as Scribd and Slideshare, etc.) Of particular interest are so-called unpublished manuscripts which researchers often add to their online-based publication lists, even though these manuscripts have not been published in traditional peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, edited volumes and the like. Do unpublished manuscripts qualify as publications from a semantic point of view? That is, what are the distinctive semantic features of the concept PUBLICATION and do they apply to unpublished manuscripts and publications alike?